Читать книгу The Adventures of Anna Atom - Elizabeth Wasserman - Страница 7

Chapter 3

MONPETIT ISLAND

Admiral Atom and his wife, Sabatina, had bought Monpetit Island just before Anna was born. It was one of the smallest of a group of beautiful tropical islands scattered almost in the middle of the Indian Ocean, just south of the equator. Their island was one of the many peaks of a mountain range that had disappeared under the sea millions of years ago. It was now covered with coconut palms and takamaka trees.

In the middle of the island, in the shade of some huge granite boulders, the admiral had built a house in the traditional Creole style. The roof was thickly thatched with dried palm leaves that shaded the interior from the harsh tropical sun. A broad veranda circled the house, and bamboo shades rolled down around its edges to keep out the tropical rain. Inside, huge fans whirled over all the rooms, stirring the air into a gentle breeze that always kept it cool.

A forest of breadfruit, mango and avocado trees surrounded the house. Wild vanilla and passion-fruit blossoms added their fragrance to the scent of the bark of an old cinnamon tree marking the footpath down to the sea. The beach was made of powdery white sand, and coral filled the shallow water around the island with life and colour. A myriad of fish and other creatures frolicked in the clear, warm water, and turtles came ashore at night to lay their eggs.

Next to a wooden jetty stood a small hut, and that was where the boat Ton used to take Anna to school and to run errands on the main island was moored. From the air or the deck of a passing ship, the little island may have looked like just another pretty picture on a travel agent’s website.

But this was no ordinary leisure island, because the beach hut also marked the entrance to Monpetit’s secret underground facilities, dug deep into its granite belly. Concealed inside the hut was the air-conditioning plant, and a trapdoor covered the stairs down to Professor Sabatina’s subterranean laboratory. In another part of the underground cavern, the family kept their more unusual vehicles, which were intended mainly for scientific purposes. The Jetcopter was seldom used, but when Anna was little, Sabatina had often taken her on scenic cruises in the Submarine Explorer, to enjoy the beautiful scenery of the island’s underwater world.

On an island like this, Anna’s life might have seemed perfect, except that these days Anna’s mom was always busy, and there wasn’t a lot of time for leisure. That, and the fact that an accident with an atom-displacement ray had confined her father to living in space. His molecules had become unstuck, and the earth’s gravity was too much for him: in his current form, he could only survive in zero gravity, at least until somebody figured out how to cure him. She missed her dad so much that it sometimes felt as if a dark shadow edged the bright tropical sun.

Anna’s little brother Pip wasn’t of much use to her either. Half-human, half-machine, he was the prototype of a new kind of biotron the US scientists were developing. He could run exceptionally fast and appeared to be inhumanly strong, amongst other things. But Anna understood little of all of that – she only knew that five-year-old biotron brothers are exceedingly annoying. Pip didn’t talk much, and when he did, he made no sense to her. He was clumsy and he broke her things.

So Anna played mostly by herself, with Mutt as her one constant companion.